In the meantime, as I was trying to imagine a true Mars Hill experience in our present culture, I glanced over at my bookshelf and there saw a book which my bride had bought me entitled A Place for Truth: Leading Thinkers Explore Life's Hardest Questions,* a compilation of essays from the Veritas Forum, edited by Dallas Willard. I took it as a theophany, and opened it.
I love the way a new book feels, before the cover gets all curled and the pages all fanned out. I opened the book for the first time and began to read. The Veritas Forum began in 1992 when "a small group of Christians at Harvard hosted the university for a weekend of lectures and discussions exploring some of life's most important questions. Their hope was to restore within the university a space for asking deep questions, seeking real answers and building community around the search for truth" (p. 11). In the intervening years Veritas Forums have taken place at campuses throughout the US and Canada. Willard has compiled some of the best presentations therefrom.
In the opening essay of the book, Richard John Neuhaus declares:
We Christians have an inescapable obligation to contend that there is truth, and that all truths finally serve the one truth. There is one truth because there is one God and one revelation of God in Jesus Christ... It's not only for the sake of the Christian gospel, it's for the sake of our responsibility in our society. It's a socially disastrous, community destroying thing to deny that there is a truth that binds us together—Christian and Jew and Muslim and believer and nonbeliever and atheist and secular and black and white and Asian (28-29).So, perhaps we do have an Areopagus, like Paul, where we can proclaim "the unknown god". But how do we go about doing so? Neuhaus cautions,
But we have to demonstrate that we, as Christians, have understood... how Christians claiming to possess the truth can indeed be destructive of public discourse. Christians who are overwhelmingly confident that they actually possess the truth in the sense of being in control of the truth [emphasis mine] can become the enemies of civil discourse (36).Or, as William Temple, Archbishop of Canterbury is reputed to have said, "It's possible to be right repugnantly." If you want a concrete example of this, think of the Westboro Baptist Church of Topeka, Kansas, and their anti-homosexual-themed picketing of funerals of soldiers killed in Iraq.
I agree with Neuhaus that we who follow Jesus have an obligation and responsibility to declare that there is such a thing as truth. And the only way I see to avoid the pitfall becoming the enemies of civil discourse is to carry on those conversations in the context of relationships forged in our community.
I look forward to reading more of this book. I anticipate it will provide more fodder for this blog!
*InterVarsity Press, 2010. ISBN 978-0-8308-3845-5
While I'm not a fan of the Westboro Baptist methods, I am also not fond of phrases like "civil discourse". It sounds good--don't get me wrong. I believe that truth-sharing needs to be done in love and in the context of some kind of relationship...as civil as possible. But when I hear things like "civil discourse" I also hear the subtler message "just calm down--don't get too radical". That message goes against everything I read in the Bible about Jesus' ministry and the ministry of the early church. Jesus was not afraid to speak truth that offended. In fact, some of the things He said were so offensive that the religious leaders wanted to kill Him. That doesn't sound like "civil discourse" to me. The disciples of the early Church were threatened, beaten and imprisoned for the gospel message. And what did they do after one of the first of such beatings? Did they calm down? No, they asked for more boldness in sharing the gospel! The apostle Paul may have tried "civil discourse", but like Jesus there were a lot of people out to kill him for what he said. The church in the West needs a good dose of persecution like what is experienced in many other parts of the world. Then we'll see what it really means to be "enemies of civil discourse".
ReplyDeleteThat's just a few of my thoughts on the subject...
There is a time to break your horse, and a time to lasso it.
ReplyDeleteHmmm. Say more, Rob. What is the breaking, and when is the lassoing?
ReplyDeleteAnd Lisa, I hear you. I do think, though, that there is a place for vigorous truth-telling within the context of "civil discourse", so called. I am recollecting the aphorism that "people don't care what you know until they know that you care". I recollect, also, that Jesus never swore at anyone but the Church.
I like that analogy of the breaking and lassoing (sp?) a horse. We certainly must seek to have the wisdom of God to know when it is the time for breaking and when it's time for lassoing. And yes, Don, people want to see that we genuinely care about them when we are sharing the truth. Unfortunately I see a trend toward more "showing them we care" without sharing the truth with them about their spiritual condition. Either extreme is not healthy.
ReplyDeleteRight, Lisa—we are privy to the cure for a fatal disease; if we care, we will want others to know. The problem as I see it is that "Christians" have forfeited their voice exactly because we have replaced truth-telling with care-giving. The culture has been inoculated against the cure because of the inactivated gospel we have in large part been purveying for the last several decades, at least. It's only in relationship that we can act as carriers of the "live virus" of life of Jesus (to push this metaphor waaaaay over the top!).
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